Is choice a good thing?

Walk through any supermarket here in the U.S and you’ll find tons of choices. Want a simple can of soup, you have to wade through 15 different brands of chicken noodle. Or toothpaste, or cereal, or ice cream. Heck, we even have to make a choice between ketchup brands.

Now choice may be good. I know I appreciate having a choice of certain things I need, use or enjoy. And I know I’d be upset if someone took away Breyer’s ice cream and made me buy from only one brand.

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Business is about relationships. Relationships are about people. So it should be obvious that people do business with people, not businesses.

Yet I’m always surprised how many small business owners miss this. Somewhere in all their efforts to develop their business plan and marketing strategy they seem to forget that it’s about the people.

Maybe it’s using terms like target audience or niche market that somehow dehumanizes their thoughts, I’m unsure. Or perhaps it’s the way we think about business in general as being a cold, cut-throat world where business owners are always trying to gain an upper hand on the competition. I know it’s hard to see people when we’re thinking like that.

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You know I love word of mouth marketing. I find it to be one of the purest, simplest and most rewarding ways of getting my business known.

But did you know that word of mouth marketing can be illegal?

According to Andy Sernovitz there’s a new bill (pdf) being introduced in the U.K. which will make some marketing practices illegal. The bill is meant to stop false and misleading marketing practices. Of course, word of mouth marketing could easily fit into that category if marketers were deceptive about their campaigns.

So what makes word of mouth marketing illegal?

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A couple of years ago John was laid off from his job working in the assembly plant for Ford Motor company. He’d been there 15 years and came to work on a Tuesday to find out he was being laid off.

John had worked at some sort of job since he was nine. He had a paper route, then three. When he was eleven he started mowing lawns for neighbors. That quickly grew to raking leaves and shoveling snow.

John never much liked school and so as many of his friends went off to college after graduation, John landed a job with Ford assembling dashboard parts on the assembly line. Good work – and great pay – for a eighteen year-old.

Now, at thirty-four John found himself out of work. John hadn’t married yet – though he was dating the woman who would become his wife. And living a simple life in a modest house he managed to sock away a nice little nest egg.

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Have you ever considered quitting?

Neither had I. But since hearing Seth Godin speak about his book, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches you When to Quit (and When to Stick), last year it’s constantly been on my mind.

In The Dip, Seth suggests that all successful people know one thing before they become successful – they know when to quit. They know when to recognize when what they’re doing isn’t going to generate success. So what do successful people do? They quit. They quit doing what’s not leading them toward success so they can put their efforts into things that can lead to success.

As with Seth’s usual approach, he uses The Dip to talk about how to become the best in the world. This seems to be his new way of saying do something remarkable. But the core message is the same – be great to those who think you’re great. In other words – find your niche and become known as being great to those who you interact and work with.

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There are lots of keys to creating a successful business. Yet the one that I’ve found to be most important – and often most lacking in small businesses is positioning.

There’s lots of definitions of positioning because the term is often used along side branding. The definition that I gravitate to is:

Positioning is the space that you wish to occupy in your target audience’s mind, relative to your competitors.

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Every business owner wants to make more money.

Doesn’t matter whether you sell products or pitch a service – you probably want more clients, customers, buyers, patrons, consumers, subscribers, users, etc. Doesn’t matter what you call them – you’d like more.

After all, doesn’t more subscribers equal more people to market too? More patrons mean increasing sales? And increased sales equals more revenue. Isn’t that how it works?

Most of us know that. Yet many business owners set their focus too strongly on increasing revenue. They spend their time, their energy and their resources focused on making more money. And so they become like a hamster running around the wheel of trying to increase their profits – often, getting nowhere.

But what if you took some of that time to build relationships with your clients and customers? What if you took some time to build relationships with some of your leads? Better yet, what if you spent some time and resources to build relationships with other business owners? Businesses that compliment yours in one way or another. Or grew relationships with other business owners you have other interests in common with? What could happen?

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